Quotes on Prayer

A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?

Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublimest; the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of human possibilities-they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.

Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer your prayer.

We have control over our prayer life, our relationship with Jesus.

Purity is the fruit of prayer.

Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.

Against the persecution of a tyrant the godly have no remedy but prayer.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

I join the March for Life in Washington with my prayers. May God help us respect all life, especially the most vulnerable.

Before we can change anything in our life, we have to recognize that this is the way it is meant to be right now. For me, acceptance has become what I call the long sigh of the soul. It's the closed eyes in prayer, perhaps even the quiet tears. It's "all right," as in "All right, You lead, I'll follow." And it's "all right" as in "Everything is going to turn out all right." This is simply part of the journey.

Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

Don't ever hesitate to take to [God] whatever is on your heart. He already knows it anyway, but He doesn't want you to bear its pain or celebrate its joy alone.

That prayer has great power which a person makes with all his might. It makes a sour heart sweet, a sad heart merry, a poor heart rich, a foolish heart wise, a timid heart brave, a sick heart well, a blind heart full of sight, a cold heart ardent. It draws down the great God into the little heart; it drives the hungry soul up into the fullness of God; it brings together two lovers, God and the soul, in a wondrous place where they speak much of love.

Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.

You could remove the powerful preaching from our church and it would still continue. You could remove the administration of pastoral care through the cell group system and the church would still continue. But if you remove the prayer life of our church it would collapse.

We seek a constitutional amendment to permit voluntary school prayer. God should never have been expelled from America's classrooms in the first place.

The prayer life does not consist of perpetual repetition of petitions. The prayer life consists of life that is always upward and onward and Godward

It is God who gives us the spirit of worship (Psalm 133:3), and it is what we know of God that produces this spirit of worship. We might say that worship is simply theology, doctrine, what we think about God, going into top gear! Instead of merely thinking about Him, we tell Him, in prayer and praise and song, how great and glorious we believe Him to be!